“Deconstructionism” was the brainchild of French philosopher Jacques Derrida who named the process of breaking down established forms. The term is normally applied to text but also describes breaking down conventions and normal boundaries. His idea was - not to ‘contradict.’ because to contradict just means the deconstructionists plays the same old game of creating dualities. when one contradicts, one only substitutes one ‘false truth’ for another ‘false truth.’ so his project was to create a philosophy of multiple perspectives that are only ‘true’ relative to a specific, and temporary context, space, and time. for Derrida, to deconstruct means many things, but one term he used often is to – decenter. his process of writing is follow ‘difference’ rather than sameness. rationality in the western tradition is always based on sameness, on identity – A = A. but for Derrida, A never equals A, or not for long. or not once it leaves one place or time for another.

To ‘decenter’ means to take a concept, a believe, a truth, or the interpretation of some object, like a dress, and write about it in such a way that it can only have many, many meanings/interpretations. a dress is not a gown or a skirt or a miniskirt or a sari or a sarong. to dress means to put on clothes but it can also mean to dress a wound. it can mean to dress of a particular occasion or to design clothes for a particular occasion or person. it can mean to decorate, or to prepare, as in dress a fish or turkey, or ad a dressing to a salad. so deconstruct and decenter means to follow the differences between SOME OR ALL OF those meanings, by following the differences between each use of the word, dress.

Decentering, deconstructing means to ‘break the pattern.’ the pattern of meanings that become rigid. a pattern is used in fashion to make every particular design exactly the same. for mass production. so to decenter or deconstruct mass produced fashion would be to decenter and deconstruct the pattern. to find a way of working so that every dress is NOT ‘cut from the same cloth.’

Derrida’s work is largely referred as an explicit influence in music and the arts and with many art critics, and particularly in architecture where it encourages radical freedom of form and the open manifestation of complexity in a building rather than strict attention to functional concerns and conventional design elements.

What is deconstruction fashion? It’s a fashion item that looks unfinished and the designer is still in the midst of experimenting with the product. Normally, the fashion item has exposed seams, raw edges, displacement of certain component and some sort of treatment to make it look distressed. Deconstruction fashion is meant to challenge the traditional perception.

In philosophy, deconstruction reveals the instability of meaning of words and phrases, simultaneous “forming and deforming, construction and deconstruction which is never ‘destroying.’ it is always creating, often by ‘negating’ the limits of meaning, making and undoing.”Certain binary oppositions inform general views of fashion in a contemporary setting, and it is natural for one to be valued more in both the eyes of the consumer and the designer. We emphasize the final product over the process of its creation, what the garment looks like from the exterior rather than it’s interior. We value the integral structure over the decoration, and often, a garment’s form over its specific function. Deconstruction is concerned with ‘unpicking’ these traditional, uneven binaries and elevating the silent partner ( R, Gasché. 1987. p 3-4)But what if this silent partner is not the stitching or the lining but the fabric itself. What happens when the fabric is not of a simple colour or complicated decorative pattern anymore, what if it does not derived from the systematic approach of the weaver. But instead tries to carry meanings itself. Deconstruct meaning is to liberate the world. to free it from the limited ‘meanings’ given to it. to allow the ‘fabric’ of the world to have power, means to free it of the meanings that have come to limit it.

Lets say the fashion designer gets hold of a painting, not patterned fabric with symbols or an illustration but a painting that has many meanings in itself and is at the same time ‘free of meaning.’ because ‘to mean’ something means to insist that something must be one thing and not another.Over the years we have learned to see in more complex ways. We do not expect a painting to have the same composition as a still life. Expressionism was followed by Cubism was followed by constructivism was followed by abstract expressionism and than there were so many “isms” that a centralized discourse became meaningless as it only mend excluding everything that existed but did not fit in. We learned to see and live on different layers simultaneously with many meanings ALL at the same time.’

Any deconstructivism requires the existence of a particular archetypal construction, a strongly-established conventional expectation to play flexibly with. Fashion design is essentially about construction. We might begin by, making to take apart, or, we might take apart in order to make. The structure of the garment is not more important than the process of getting there.

After the artist has composed his painting, the designer cuts according to his idea of a dress or a shirt. The process is one of de constructive creation because his aim is to keep the creation alive by creating a certain flow where the painters mark making gets transformed by the designers reconstruction and where the work of art than gets worn by people in the street. The process is one of returning art into craft without loosing the qualities that Löhr’s painting can reveal and give the viewer. Joe Ikareths role is to bring the secrets to the surface and in this he is as autonomous as Löhr is in his painting. The paintings have no intention to be anything else but works of art. Alf Löhr explores the surface the material in the same way as he pours pigment and water on heavy paper, his inks are absorbed in a very specific way by the heavy India silks or the fine hand woven cottons. The iregularness of the marks influence the cutting. The material is not the same through and while Ikareth’ more casual everyday collections often explore geometrical patterns and stripes the erratic and convulsive nature of Löhr’s paintings make it impossible to simply be an architect. More than often his marks look so accidental that on a dress you might find it difficult to distinguish between a wine stain or a Windsor an Newton Crimson Hue deliberately falling from a certain height at a certain place, at a certain time of the day. At the same time Ikareth brings back a structure. He does that not only by giving the flat surface shape but also adding lines through embroidery, on the large flows of paint.Joe Ikareth is of course no stranger to art. He is an accomplished musician and object maker familiar with what it takes to make art. His years in Haute Couture have never left him and his label still produces unique dresses even thou for more affordable prices.Alf Löhr’s aim in this is to extent our ideas about art as a common good or tool that goes without saying. He dreams of a new responsibility of art to shape our world.